I stopped reading after this point. Facebook has no clue what kind of stuff gets posted on their platform, and their AI isn't powerful enough to detect it. The idea that Facebook is causing/enabling such behaviors is ridiculous. It's a big claim to make with no quantitative evidence. It's similar to when Marilyn Manson got blamed for Columbine, or GTA/violent video games got blamed for making kids violent.

Facebook is morally bankrupt, but not for these sensationalist reason.

Facebook enjoys the protection of its IPR and the right to sell advertisement overseas in places like New Zealand or Europe. Why should New Zealand or Europe allow their business model of close to zero oversight of content? Facebook is not a startup. It's a huge company making billions showing ads to billions.

Edit: nor competative. For that matter.

And those are probably already dinosaurs compared to most recent developments on that market.

Europe is exceptionally bad at creating their own services. Maybe because it is just too convenient to use American ones or that there isn't really any venture capital available here. But the fact remains.

Subjectively, it seems we often also lack the openness for new ideas compared to America, especially around older generations.

Europe doesn't even know the significance of freedom right know. Not taking the right decision is often less important than owning it yourself. Americans seem to get that. Most of the time at least.

Europe is also very fragmented and there was hope the EU could fix that but Brexit and other internal and external factors(i.e Russia, China, Tump's policy etc) seem oppose a cohesive, united Europe for obvious reasons.

It has little to nothing to do with "openness" for new ideas. It's more about a chain of unfortunate events.

What does Huawei dominance in 5G and its ban has to do with "openness" or new ideas?

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/07/15/trump-nat...

There's much wrong with Facebook but blaming them for not preventing the actions of their users at the moment those actions take place is moronic.

That's not quite true. No one blames the US postal service for death threats sent in the mail. Facebook is not the USPS, but it's not a traditional publisher either — and just like the USPS it simply couldn't work if you wanted the same level of editorial oversight as a publisher.

edit: typo

You can send one message and it'll be received by many.

Facebook may not have to take responsibility for users' content or wrangling with issues such as free speech but they must take responsibility for what and how they choose to amplify and recommend that content to others.

Traditionally this is a power that has only been held by broadcasters. Broadcasters have things like time delays and "dump switches" when they are conducting live shows. The time delays are mostly used to insert the "bleeps" for bad language. The "dump switch" is a more brutal approach that allows them to avoid broadcasting something that is going terribly wrong.

Broadcasters also have "watersheds" that place time constraints on when certain types of things can be broadcast and broadly define who the expected audiences are.

In this case, Facebook are acting more like a broadcaster than a publisher or message conveyer. Because the audience can be more tightly controlled than a regular broadcaster, there is a case to be made for making the responsibility bar higher, not lower, so that inappropriate content cannot be deliberately targeted at vulnerable people.

Then maybe it shouldn't behave like one. FB actively selects articles to show on your feed - via algorithm, instead via human, but the effect is the same.

That is a choice they could easily undo. It is also a choice a large number of people would be happy to see. ("I just want my feed ordered by date, no filtering" is a very common request). The only reason that doesn't happen is that the enragement metrics go up if you select what you present to people.

So FB is deliberately choosing articles to show you, and it is making that selection for monetary gain. How is that not a publisher?

Mailing death threats is illegal: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/876 (so much for "free speech", eh?)

It doesn't appear to be illegal to post them on Facebook?

The question is: who should be enforcing the law....

If people were regularly mass mailing death threats to large fractions of the population, it would sure as hell get regulated.

I agree that it couldn't work in the way it currently does, but that's what I'm getting at - that maybe it shouldn't be able to work in the way that it does presently. I think that it is much more like a broadcaster than a 'platform', but I know not everyone agrees with that.

It'd also be nice if individuals were held responsible for death threats and rape threats they post on-line.

Facebook are morally corrupt because they aid and abet morally corrupt individuals. Both Facebook and those individuals should be held to account for that.

I'm pretty sure "the usual fools" turn out to be complete hypocrites when it's their girlfriend/sister/mother getting rape threats too...

And there's no "1st Amendment to the US constitution" right to "free speech" in most of the world. If your Nazi hate speech ends up in Germany, both you and Facebook will be held to account for that no matter how many Ayn Rand books you've read or how dedicated to ethics in video game journalism you are.

For those of us outside the U.S. that don't subscribe to their view on free speech... it's not a negative.

If they win their case I do not see why FB should be held to a higher standard.

I contend as a society we should hold these massive tech orgs (who have more power than most governments) to the standard of moderating the content that's posted to their platforms. They have the money and profits to hire human moderators, the 'dumb pipe' defense doesn't fly for me anymore.

Twitter/Reddit should face harsh penalties for failing to moderate and remove content that encourages and indoctrinates extremists. I'm not talking about anything that's borderline, I'm talking about pure unfiltered hate speech that directly encourages violence.

The question then becomes who decides what's acceptable content, the only answer is regulations and legislation for this otherwise for-profit tech giants will be the ones who decide and they're more concerned with user-engagement than far reaching detached societal implications.

Nobody is broadcasting in TV or newspapers - they are actually liable for content that gets published on those platforms.

Maybe we finally remove exception for internet?

All of this still happens today. Just two weeks ago I read an article in the NYTimes reporting on how NZ's prime minister asked people not to use or spread the shooter's name. In the same article NYTimes revealed it multiple times. The only frames from the video I've seen are the ones the Washington Post used--The shooters face blown up as the huge cover photo for the story. It just happens that now the internet is the biggest publication platform instead of television or print, so it naturally attracts psychopaths that are seeking the greatest impact.

The reality is that none of these publishing platforms are held liable and the media and HN don't want the internet to be held liable, either--they want FB to be held liable because they don't like FB. No one here is screaming for YouTube's heads after they failed to prevent millions of copies of the videos from being uploaded in the immediate aftermath of the shooting.

Drawing parallels between mediums like TV/Film is problematic because there's never been anything like the internet in human history, that being said a TV example of the kind of content that shouldn't be legal: 30 minute produced broadcast dedicated to sharing fake crime stats about Muslims and encouraging viewers to organize violent attacks on their local mosques - this is what goes on the internet. Users from 8chan were (and still are) encouraging and validating the NZ shooter. We have specific incidents and shooters we can point to now. Elliot Rodgers (Santa Barbara shooter) was an active redditor and incel and had his extreme beliefs were both validated and enforced by that community before he took action, ending innocent lives. One could make a case that without the wide ranging communal support these psychotic individuals wouldn't have been emboldened to act on their hateful beliefs. Nothing even close to this is broadcast to a wide audience anywhere but the internet and it shouldn't be permitted on the internet either.

Relevant comment from HN in 2017: taurath on July 19, 2017 [-]

If 20 people were to stand up on a soapbox with a megaphone in times square screaming about /r/redpill, /r/fatpeoplehate, etc concepts they would be removed if legal, and if not legal a huge countermovement would appear to try to force them out. On Reddit you get both the megaphone and the safe space, but are still just as easily accessible to the public as anywhere.

Its "real" freedom of information, without many of the mechanisms that larger society uses to fight back against it. Instead it is just ignored and left to fester and grow until it pops into the public forum at the point where huge efforts are required to fight it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14806974

I think you badly underestimate the apathy towards this stuff. Perhaps a better comparison would be the anti-abortion protestors, who can be pretty extreme.

> 30 minute produced broadcast dedicated to sharing fake crime stats about Muslims

This is absolutely routine in the regular media.

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/why-the-british-media-i... / https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/27/islamo...

The Times is today running a series of highly misleading selectively quoted articles about gender identity services, presumably with the intent of causing violence against and suicide among trans people.

I wouldn't be so sure. People would probably just disregard the crazy screaming r/redpill or r/fatpeoplehate preachers, just like they disregard the Black Hebrew Israelites.

It's not terribly unusual to see people preaching about crazy hateful shit on the street, it is unusual for anyone to actually care though.

- "Sexual Selection and Existential Fear": about disregarding the notion that men always want sex and women do the choosing. In other words, self respect.

- "How to Structure Your Day to Maximize Productivity." This could be plucked from a magazine.

- "Practice what you learn." Pretty much what it says, basic life advice about persistence.

- "Day game works--get out there and approach" If you want to date women, approach them and make conversation. Duh.

- "Be thoroughly logical about what you want from women and what you're prepared to pay for it" Again, have some self respect and don't roll over.

This is apparently so threatening that it must be quarantined. How fragile must women be that giving men some basic sanity checking, and telling them not to worship every vagina on sight, is a threat to society and must be hysterically misrepresented and demonized at every turn.

The sad part is, red pill is probably the first time in these guys' lives that someone has given these dudes a script that can actually succeed. It's not great, it misses a lot of nuance, but it's a start. What do you want instead, incels who resent the world and think they are literally incapable of being loved, so they shouldn't try?

Actually yes, that's exactly what people seem to want. For the undesirables to go away, and for sociable people to continue to enjoy the privilege of being sufficiently attractive and sufficiently high class that useless feel good advice like "just be yourself!" is all anyone will ever need. And then calling that empathy.

The issue becomes with the internet being able to silence all dissent and create re-enforcing echo chmabers. The forces at play are not stupid and they target disenfranchised, lonely, young males full of angst.

Imagine a packed hall with hundreds of people loudly cheering for someone calling for genocide of X group, this is what these hate clusters look like and if we saw it in the real world no one would say "This is an acceptable cost of free speech"

There exists speech that has no redeeming qualities and serves only to incite violence and hate. To argue as many commented here have that outlawing this would lead down a slippery slope of authoritarian government censorship is simply ridiculous. We've outlawed child pornography and that hasn't led us down any slippery slopes.

Same as TV and newspapers; you don't sue Comcast or the guy who installed your satellite dish, you sue the TV station; You don't sue the paper boy, you sue the news paper.

Yet we insist on allowing anonymity on the net.

Either you know exactly who is doing what and can then make them liable for any consequences that follow from their actions OR you allow anonymity and live with the consequences of that decision as dark as these may be.

However, enabling complete anonymity everywhere might not be necessary for that; if you can get someone else, in a different country, to take responsibility for it, that might work too. That's similar to how journalists keep their sources secret, or how wikileaks works.

Stuff that's important will still get published as long as you can get someone else to recognise its importance. But who's going to take responsibility to publish your child porn or snuff movie in their own name?

If they're not, why do we sue the TV station rather than the production company of the programme? CBS can yell "don't look at us, we didn't make Game of Thrones".

It's their exception that is looking increasingly absurd.

I think a potential solution would be to delay livestreams by 20 minutes for anyone who isn't doesn't have a direct and established connection (eg following for more than 24 hours) to the broadcaster to give platforms time to censor the worst stuff. Obviously this would make platforms responsible for effective and fast moderation though...

You need to argue that rather than just state it. I can see arguments for and against the proposition, but the facts that Facebook attaches advertising, sometimes removes content, carefully tunes their platform to maximise "engagement", and the user has no direct relationship with the receivers of the live stream, do rather suggest that Facebook is the publisher and the role of the user is more like that of someone who writes a letter to the editor that gets published in a newspaper - except, of course, that Facebook is publishing nearly everything, but I don't see that that's a fundamental difference.

(c) (1) No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

They - or any other social media company - don't have a right to exist. If societies around the world conclude they do more harm than good as they currently operate, it's perfectly reasonable to require them to moderate adequately. If they cannot they can close, or withdraw from that region, and someone else may wish to try. Facebook could employ thousands more to moderate and supervise - without destroying their ability to make profit. Pretending the problems don't exist, as all the platforms have done so far, looks like it's not going to be tenable for much longer.

Not only am I fine with that, I think it long overdue.

So we should shut down the mosques in New Zealand because they didn't control their premises and keep the shooter out? Should we shut down banks because they didn't have enough security to keep a bank robber out? You are shifting the blame away from the perpetrator. Every crime ever could be blamed on the victim for lack of security.

It's a fair question to ask, "If a company is that profitable and having toxic effects, then why shouldn't it pay some of the cost of addressing its toxic effects?"

The tendency on HN is to say exploitive governments want to tax technology startups.

But we're not talking about technology startups. We're talking about the new old-old ATT.

cf oil or chemical companies polluting via spills, etc.

A better question would be, should a bank be held liable after being robbed if it failed its duties by designing cheap systems to save money — yes. Should a mosque/church be held liable if they received a threat and they ignored causing large loss of life — yes.

Facebook is culpable. They know the kind of garbage that floats in their platform. They continue to develop their platform and they continue to improve their ad systems. Why won’t they dedicate as much engineering effort to gain an advantage on racism/hate speech/fascism? I’ll tell you why.

Because Zuckerberg simply does not care. He owns the platform that dominates information flows and public discourse. Why would he undermine that?

I am placing additional blame on a medium that isn't willing to exercise adequate restraint or control.

A bank undoubtedly has security measures in place to prevent robbery, if they don't bother, they won't last long. Nonetheless, there are regulations on what may and may not be done for public spaces, how crowded they may be to pass fire regulation and so forth. Neither a mosque nor bank should be closed for a circumstance that could not reasonably have been predicted.

How is this any different from Facebook? A bank has security measures in place to prevent robbery, but a robbery could still take place in one and is more likely to occur in one because it's a high value target. Facebook has human and AI moderation in place that automatically processes anything you upload. Users are also able to report content. However, just like sometimes banks are robbed, sometimes objectionable content slips through their filters. By your own logic Facebook shouldn't be closed down because mass shootings cannot be reasonably predicted. The basis for your argument is fundamentally flawed and if you extrapolate it to your own examples you'll quickly see how ridiculous and illogical it is.

Primarily because we’ve been telling them they need to do a better job about this for years, so “could not reasonably have been predicted“ absolutely does not apply. They have literally been condemned by a United Nations investigator for what happened in Myanmar [1]. Multiple government have been unhappy with their attitude problem [2]. In this report, one of the problems is they “continue to host and publish the mosque attack video”, which they absolutely don’t have any excuse for not being aware of, not any more.

If this is the best that the state of the art can manage, then the state of the art is not good enough for Facebook to continue to exist. If Facebook were a human, it would have been fired for gross negligence.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/13/myanmar-u...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/oct/31/uk-and-ca...

Youtube, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit have size and reach enough that turning a blind eye is no longer credible. We've seen countless issues crop up with regard to elections, election advertising, hate speech, and in this case broadcasting a slaughter. All of which serve to demonstrate they are unwilling to self-regulate taking them into territory where it's clear current regulation is not adequate.

Calling for adequate regulation to require moderation and oversight, and to require a duty of care to their users, viewers and listeners is not calling for them to be closed down. That comes if they prove unwilling to obey said regulation, as does any of the other measures brought to bear against habitual law breakers - fines, asset seizure, blocking etc. Regulation that will vary between different countries as they will choose differing limits.

Millions of people were eating adulterated food every meal prior to food regulations. Political process and advertising was rife with corruption prior to attempts to instil a semblance of fairness limiting what was allowed and when. Yet people attempted to vote before this.

Attendance absolutely proves something when it comes to social media. You can't make a comparison between social media and food because one is necessary for survival and one isn't (I'm sure I'm going to invite a ton of comments here on how 'Facebook has become so ubiquitous and powerful it's now synonymous with survival!') If the negatives really outweighed the positives people would be leaving Facebook by the droves. It's only on HN and in the news media that this narrative is being spun.

Yes, it proves that network effects can force people into bad equilibra. If you think high university costs are harmful for society in the long run, but if you personally don't attend you will incur significant cost in the short run, with nobody cooperating, how do you behave?

Not really - I would love to be able to delete my account from Facebook but it's the only place some people that I want to keep in touch with will use.

(I did the next best thing - deleted the apps and only check the website infrequently.)

I am claiming your statement "and they feel perfectly comfortable" is unknown. Further that it is highly unlikely.

Many is not most - it probably is most of my friends and relatives, but they are representative of nothing at all. Yet there is now a certain discomfort in almost all discussions of Facebook - no matter where that takes place - that simply was not there 5 or so years ago.

However, it remains the office of government to introduce enforceable regulation in this (or any) space to protect their constituents, and hold those in violation accountable. I don't suspect it's an easy task, as the problems are broad and can be a grey area. I.e, some of the problems with Facebook stem from mischievous users -- exactly how accountable the platform is for their behavior isn't universally agreed upon.

I think if rules of engagement happen, people will have less problems with just letting the market decide.

You're underestimating the scale of this problem.

Facebook users create billions of new posts a day. And, tens of millions of these posts get reported for moderation per day.

"Thousands of more" employees isn't going to solve the problem. Assuming each posts takes 10 minutes of labor to review, you would need an army of 200K individuals, and this amount of labor would cost many billions of dollars per year.

>> Pretending the problems don't exist, as all the platforms have done so far

You must be joking. Facebook has already made massive investments into moderation. It's their top priority for 2019. In many ways, they are doing the opposite of pretending this problem doesn't exist.

>> They - or any other social media company - don't have a right to exist.

Nobody is arguing that FB has an inherent right to exist. The only point GP made was that (as made evident by your comment) many people are underestimating the associated costs with manual moderation of content.

Agreed. Let’s require them to do that.

I could go find the shooter’s illegal manifesto and post it here, I might be banned after some period of time but just like on Facebook it would have had time for other people to see it.

Applied consistently this standard would kill most online forums and that type of thing.

Just as software engineering practices need to change for the big names compared to everyone else, so do social practices.

No reason Shitbook shouldn’t be held to the same standard.

You'll almost never see far-right content any more.

I'm sorry you've internalized their bullshit, but that's what it is: bullshit. They can do it when it sells ads or stops someone senior going to jail.

Yet they can attach an ad to it in a millisecond. They’re incentivised to do one and not the other. These bills are about rebalancing those incentives.

Don’t you think they would, for example, be able to prioritize content based on reputation/hidden metrics?

Don’t you think, for example, that a fair amount of videos categories can be auto filtered with extremely high accuracy?

Don’t you think, for example, that if they had enough content moderators they would have been able to stop the stream and to take down this video faster?

Do you really think I am proposing that they review every video in FIFO order? Or did you want to reduce my proposal to that so you can easily dismiss it.

What you're proposing is discrimination and isn't a solution.

> Don’t you think, for example, that a fair amount of videos categories can be auto filtered with extremely high accuracy?

No, not really, but please provide some examples. I'm assuming you mean content category, not literal tagged category, in which case you can't really distinguish between someone livestreaming in their car vs. the Christchurch shooter driving up to the mosque.

> Don’t you think, for example, that if they had enough content moderators they would have been able to stop the stream and to take down this video faster?

Sure, but they already have many thousands of moderators in addition to automated systems in place today. It's inevitable that unless every post is hand-reviewed by a human that some objectionable content will slip through.

I get that your point is that FB and the other big tech companies can certainly afford to be doing more than they currently are, but to the extent that we would almost certainly be in this exact same position even if they had hired your proposed 50,000 moderators there's not much substance to your proposal that I can even reduce.

Like rank/derank the feed based on contextual clues? No way this wasn't the first thing done.

> Don’t you think, for example, that a fair amount of videos categories can be auto filtered with extremely high accuracy?

They've touted high accuracy in "using AI" for content moderation, like 95% or 99% or something. i.e. using machine learning to automatically tag content.

> Don’t you think, for example, that if they had enough content moderators they would have been able to stop the stream and to take down this video faster?

So your proposal boils down to "hire more people so more content can be filtered faster". GP perhaps didn't steelman your argument for you but if your proposal were to be applied the only real delta would be workforce size. It follows that your proposal in effect reduces to "hire more people".

According to a 3-month old article, $FB supposedly employs 7,500 moderators [0], though it's unclear what constitutes "employment" in this case. Probably a salary of less than $5k/yr. Are there really thouhsands of content moderators pulling up to FBHQ in Menlo Park 5 days a week? I don't think so, no.

[0] https://www.inc.com/christine-lagorio/facebook-content-moder...

That number has only increased in recent months and will likely continue to increase in the near future. Not all of them are designated content moderators, it's true, so technically they likely only employ one or two "10s of thousands", but I'm mainly addressing the misconception in the thread that Facebook is "doing nothing." That's a significant amount of moderators. Is it enough? No, but to claim or pretend that they aren't actively doing anything is facetious and something I've been seeing more and more of on HN lately.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebo...

1. Online services should maintain an acceptable legal and moral standard of the content they serve. 2. Online services should be able to profitably facilitate the communication between millions and billions of users.

Which of these concerns seems more important to you, regardless of what you believe is an acceptable legal and moral standard?

What forums are those? Because this isn't the case with the forums I frequent. The boards I read / participate in tend to operate on the principle of "don't make me come over there", and everything is reactive, not proactive. I'm not sure how you'd get things like "user was banned for this post" etc otherwise...

I don't have a problem with moderation being delayed. I have a problem with there being no moderation or clueless moderation (I have reported hundreds of obviously fake accounts or pages promoting outright illegal activity, and the majority of those got ignored).

Of course, the scale was much smaller than Facebook, but my point is that maybe if you can't solve this problem then you shouldn't be in a position to broadcast & promote stuff to the entire world? The danger of Facebook (& other social networks) isn't in your friends seeing your malicious post, it's that your malicious post can go "viral" and be put in front of people who haven't asked for anything since the ranking algorithm is based on stuff like "likes", shares, etc (and a lot of garbage content tends to attract likes unfortunately) which can also be manipulated by a determined attacker (using fake/compromised accounts to "like" the post, etc).

Nothing is visible until it's been validated. Guardian comments still do this for some topics.

With all the assorted profiling going on, I'm sure just as some users (like via Tor or VPN) are automatically given harder Google captchas, or some boards make you earn enough karma to perform certain actions, reactionary moderating could be something you have to earn, and sustain. Perhaps certain interests would trigger proactive moderating too.

Not perfect but certainly capable of taking much load off human moderators.

Car manufacturers can't prevent accidents - what do you mean?

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2018/06/gse-phones-st...

Do they? Most content posted to Facebook has very low reach. If I live stream something for my friends it’s not going to bring in enough revenue to pay a minimum wage employe to watch it in real time.

How many people do you think it would take to proactively moderate all the video uploaded to YouTube? Back in 2017 it was apparently 300 hours a minute. Do the Fermi estimate on that. That's not a productive use of humanity.

That way users can choose which platform they prefer, the more censored version, or the less censored version.

https://merchdope.com/youtube-stats/

It boggles my mind that people can be simultaneously against the Chinese censorship and in favor of NZ censorship. It's the same exact thing, just cranked to a different degree. How do you live with both points of view in your head at the same time?

And lest I be deliberately "misinterpreted", I don't think that this shooting video should be on FB or that removing it from there represents "censorship". I also don't think we should go much beyond removing mass shooting livestreams however. Nor should anyone go to prison for 14 years for redistributing it.

I’ve largely ducked out of these conversations on HN anymore, trying to explain why basic free speech is important, and hitting resistance, shows the obvious failings (success?) of public modern schooling.

We have a new young generation that seems to unquestionably look to government for all answers, and demand to be silenced by biased censors and it’s shocking.

  >> We have a new young generation that seems to 
  >> unquestionably look to government for all answers

The very same people seem to suggest that we abolish the 1st and 2nd amendment, and in the same breath suggest that "our democracy is dying" and we're on our way to "totalitarianism". How these things can be suggested at the same time, I don't know. Seems like utter and complete lack of critical thinking skills to me.

I don't think the NZ government is scooping up and murdering political disedents.

That should be up to the people, not the government.

Sounds hellish — and very likely to be practiced disequitably, compounded with the power to silence critics of the system as extremists.

If thry were "dumb pipes" I would have more sympathy, but they are spending yens of millions on AI to tune exactly what to shove in front of us, to keep us engaged.

Anybody else remember email?

We'll never go back to it, but don't act like the social media-driven scenario we have today is all there will ever be. If things like Twitter and Facebook became moderated, and people became dissatisfied, they'll do the same as they ever did with social media: go elsewhere. (By the way, let's take a moment to remember Digg)

And maybe, just maybe, we can go back to a saner time where we don't have to defend the status quo, hideous as it is.

None of what you wrote is a response to what I said, beside “well, if it gets bad enough, society will adapt”.

You admit that in the current market, those companies are vastly important in a way that can’t change quickly and their acting as censors could turn so bad, it would force a change to the very way we communicate.

I think “hellish” is an apt description of “would reshape hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars of economic activity in response to the social disfunction it caused”.

> None of what you wrote is a response to what I said

My post was that there are alternatives to Facebook and Twitter having the monopoly on public discourse, proved it by demonstrating alternative methods by which no one (or two) entities have any such monopoly.

You spoke about a "vision for society". Typically when people talk about a vision, they're talking about the future. I gave a vision of the future.

> You admit that in the current market, those companies are vastly important in a way that can't change quickly and their acting as censors could turn so bad, it would force a change to the very way we communicate

I didn't say any of that. I mean, I agree with you. But you were talking about a vision for society. I gave mine.

I think you've decided I said something quite different from what I actually said.

Your non-sequitur other wishes have nothing to do with that being a hellish vision.

I'm sorry, I didn't realise you were the discussion warden. If we're not keeping strictly in step with the topic you've put up for discussion, we're to be derided, are we?

> Your non-sequitur

Goodness, your tone is nothing but rude. Your previous comment's lone "Okay." was much the same. Just because we're not all agog at your comment and have our own points of view to contribute…

Try adding a touch of flexibility to your interlocution.

Of course they do. People report.

And in my personal experience, Facebook always(!) replies "not against community standards", even when clear-cut crimes like rape threats.

On the other hand, a Facebook group I created for my CS course with a few hundred members and just a bunch of helpful course material and questions vanished for a few months without any sort of warning or notification, and showed up like it had never been gone in the first place. I tried to contact Facebook, even finding a form specifically for groups that vanish, and got no reply whatsoever. I still don't know what the hell happened there.

Also, report it to the police with all the evidence and screenshots you've got and just let them handle it.

It might not bring down Facebook on its own, but it will add to all the other demands that Facebook needs to get a better handle on this sort of thing.

A criminal conviction of a Facebook employee would make a good story, but that is much harder.

I just imagine if someone found a snuff video on my basement that I would be in violation of a law.

I wouldn't be surprised if after seeing videos of babies being killed, people being beheaded and hung, that some sperm yelling at women might not even register to them as a bad thing.

Social networks already make it harder to maintain these standards because they dissociate their subjects from one another. It's easier for me to send you a death threat if, to me, you're just a bunch of words I disagree with under a profile picture.

They also facilitate the mobilization of like-minded people at an awesome scale, however widely unaccepted their behavior is. If you can get your sense of social belonging satisfied by 100000 other pedophiles from all over the world on a social network, why should you conform to any widely recognized social standard? Why should you work on your problems when thousands of rape apologists are patting your back and reinforcing your delusions?

Finally, social networks exploit these weaknesses, exploit our sense of pride and our ideas of what is right and wrong. More polarized and controversial information leads to more discussion. More discussion leads to more social data. More social data leads to better ads. There is an incentive for social networks to push objectionable and worthless information. The relationship is perhaps indirect in that it just happens to be the best way to turn a profit, but we shouldn't let our social standards budge for a system that is designed to maximize a profit margin.

Facebook needs some blame too.

Yes, but the damage has been done then. Parent is right. Facebook doesn't know what is being posted, only afterwards, when people tell them, then they know.

The question isn't whether it's currently technically viable for Facebook to monitor the content their users post, but that since they're hosting it, maybe they should have a clue and design the service accordingly. If they are held liable for it and can't solve the problem technically, just let them (and services like it) die off. It wouldn't be a great loss to society as far as I'm concerned.

> It's similar to when Marilyn Manson got blamed for Columbine

What was Marilyn Manson's connection to the Columbine shooting? What is Facebook's connection to hosting morally repulsive content on their service? In my opinion these answers are different enough to merit the question on which grounds you make this comparison.

They promoted a culture of greed over morality. It's a curse on humanity.

They're 100% responsible for building a platform which allows for this kind of content to be posted and broadcast en-masse with zero responsibility or accountability.

It amazes me people think that making a profit from this kind of "platform" is acceptable.

I'd entertain some debate over the definition of publish, as well as whether or not Facebook refuses to accept any responsibility... but outside that nuance it's a fairly objective claim of Facebook's capability and behavior.

I see it as a quite reasonable position to assume that playing violent video games can ease people's inhibition to engage in IRL violence. I personally believe the liberty infringement, and ultimately, violence, that is necessary to ban them is worse than the violent behavior they can influence.

That seems a bit "sensationalist".

I think that really what you mean to say is that regulation of "broadcasting" user-generated content (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast_delay), especially sensationalist content that appeals to people's emotions^1, could mean the end of social media's lucrative profit margins. Social media could still exist even if it were not very profitable.

Facebook does have a clue what is posted. For example, a recent docuentary on public television showed teams of people in the Phillipines reviewing individual posts.

1. Sensationalism, appealing to people's emotions. The same tactic that caused you to stop reading is also what caused you to start reading. It is the same tactic Facebook must use to attract and keep people's attention. The non-sensationalist (boring, non-controversial) personal content that is posted to Facebook -- what makes the website useful for so many people -- is not helping Zuckerberg's business. In the face of endless competition for people's attention on the internet, it stands to reason that he has an incentive to allow and even promote sensationalist content.

Slightly off topic, but if you make this a habit, i.e. stop reading after the first sentence you disagree with/sounds like bs to you, there is no chance of getting out of the filter bubble as you're building it yourself. Of course this applies equally to me and all other participants of global information exchange.

I don't know about AI, but they have an army of moderators with a strict set of rules. Yet, content that many people would consider hate speech, racism, etc. does not get blocked, even after being reported several times. Are the moderators to lax in interpreting the rules? Or are the rules not strict enough.

(To give context: I believe that hate speech is protected by free speech. And should FB block white supremacists it would not be cencorship.)

Plus, facebook is full of tracking, so it's very nice to have place to create a full graph of all data of the haters. If you need an investigation, it's easier to find people IRL. Win-win.

I think the time for platforms and major tech companies to dodge their responsibility has passed. At least in large parts of the western world and I personally welcome it. I’m European though, we (at least some of us) tend to like regulating companies.

Theoretically, no, Facebook could not spend nearly its entire annual revenue on content moderators and still have a platform to speak of.

Well there is your problem. Why is Facebook held to a different standard than other media? ("Because they want to earn more money" is not a good answer)

Education about handling media is the better approach to banning. It is naive to think politically charged content would be exempt from ambitions to ban it.

> The idea that Facebook is causing/enabling such behaviors is ridiculous

Those two points are not related to each other.

Zuckerberg has written that, “live videos often lead to discussion among viewers on Facebook—in fact, live videos on average get six times as many interactions as regular videos.” [0]. Live streams are far more valuable to Facebook due to the more "meaningful" interactions they generate. When coupled with their ability to identify and target quite specific demographics (see 'detailed targeting' [1],[2] ), they absolutely have the power to better target any AI and human moderators. If they were to couple this with a built-in live-stream delay (allowing say for some level of video content analysis prior to display) then I contend they could score 'harmful' material reasonably accurately - perhaps accurately enough to pipe into a queue for human vetting before publication (of course, unless they try, we'll never know for sure, so arguments on this are kind of moot). However, each of these elements come at a cost to FB's business model. MZ has already spoken out against delays in live streaming.

Also, your rebuttal is disingenuous. The claim that they "have no clue what kind of stuff gets posted on their platform", doesn't jibe with their self-described abilities (as pitched to their advertiser customers as "detailed targetting"). I agree that they can't identify with 100% accuracy, but that's not required. If they can get the accuracy high enough that a higher-scrutiny vetting process can be imposed (wether AI or human), then that's sufficient. As for the claim their AI "isn't powerful enough to detect it", can you provide anything to back up that statement?

The real question is: are Facebook and the other social-media and tech content publishers responsible for the content they publish (irrespective of where it's sourced)? My belief is 'yes'. When someone posts on Facebook they are not pubhlishing. They are contributing. Facebook are publishing. Hence, Facebook should be held to the same standards as other publishers.

Arguments that "censoring Facebook means the end of free discourse", are pretty weak when there are still many alternatives (e.g. Mastodon and others) that are more user-centric and resistant to both censorship and abuse (through higher rates of group-local self-moderation).

People have a right to free speech. They don't have a right to impose speech on others. They don't have a right to voilate other's freedoms (as hate speech and trolling often does). Similarlly, companies don't have a right to operate without any kind of regulation at all. Regulation exists to ensure a balance between the good of the market and the good of the commons.

[0] https://blog.hootsuite.com/facebook-algorithm/

[1] https://www.facebook.com/business/help/717368264947302

[2] https://www.facebook.com/business/help/182371508761821

When you literally have thousands of humans all determined to bypass these detection systems by modifying the video and disguising it in various ways some of them are inevitably going to slip through. Is that really an issue with the detection system, or is there something wrong with the people who repeatedly try and upload and share videos of mass shootings?

Yes. A detection system can be used to limit occurrences of this issue.

In this case, an issue with the detection system used on Facebook was demonstrated by a 20% failure rate.

But can an algorithm recognize that a video is of someone committing a real-life atrocity? Those are comparatively rare.

The usage of AI as a magic silver bullet always frustrates me.

In a perfect world, where everyone is liable for the material they host on their own servers, services with this many users wouldn't exist in the first place.

This is because somehow as a society we decided that child porn is so bad, that there are no excuses to providing any resources for it.

All companies need to make sure that no child porn is posted on their sites, or if it is, then it's taken down immediately and reported to the proper authorities. Failure to do that will get sites blocked by their ISPs, or any of their tech providers if they detect it first (which usually happens within hours or even minutes).

Politics aside, technically, all large enough sites (which allow users to post content) already have the resources and processes in place to monitor and filter all their content. And they are making a conscious decision about what they filter.

Automatic censorship of live feeds, how do you do that? Automatic take downs of videos doctored to avoid being removed, how to do you do that?

Then if you have these automatic systems in place how do you avoid getting accused of censoring everyone?

I don't think Facebook is a doing the world a lot of good. But this is silly. It just shows how little the commissioner has thought about the details of his comments.

Live streams are a game changer in helping people get out content. If you try to force more providers to vet material, it breaks down the massive availability. Sure it might foster a growth in self-hosted solutions like PeerTube, and help increase more tooling for discovery and reach; but there still aren't any really decent self-hosted streaming solutions. It's a hard problem space. U-Stream was in that market, before it was sold to IBM.

I lived NZ for several years and I find the current moral panic feels very reactionary. It's finding fear in everything; not unlike how schools locked down after Columbine with lots of security theater (more locked doors; made it harder for the smokers to hide--for better and for worse).

Many people I know there are totally willing to defend not having free speech, which made me truly realize how much it's baked into the psyche of the American identity.

Many people here don't value free speech even a little bit. I fear where this will lead us.

They just want to "teach people lessons", it's quite sad really.

Only on Facebook could this have spread like it did.

As one Kiwi told me recently: "I have never heard anyone complain about our Censor".

The ridiculous scare-mongering by some of the sibling comments on this post about this being "the start of the end for NZ" is not representative of: A) New Zealand B) Most countries outside of the US.

(Because it's a continuation of existing policy; That not all speech is protected).

As a society, at some point we have to make the decision: Where do we draw the line with speech designed to incite hate and violence; and where do we draw the line on those that enable that speech to reach the masses?

In the US, the answer has been "We don't". In NZ, the answer has been "some speech is reprehensible and we will not tolerate it." This means there's an expectation that anyone of the scale and influence of Facebook should be able to moderate violent speech as it pertains to NZ (Keep in mind that something like 80% of the countries population is on FaceBook. That's an enormous amount of influence they have on the nation).

I'm also a New Zealander, and I work in tech; I agree with the Government here. Facebook will effectively benefit from this event in multiple instances:

1) It drives engagement with there platform (outrage -> views -> engagement) 2) It's more data for there technical god, which will in turn use it to better sell the people (political/fear-mongering?) adverts.

The easiest solution, and one that I think is entirely reasonable, is to not offer live videos in New Zealand. If they're unable or unwilling to moderate the content with regards to NZ law, and given the scale of there operations in NZ (even if that's small fry compared to facebook's scale in other nations) then it's reasonable for the government to impose restrictions on them.

(More generally, I feel government exists to ensure the collective safety and security of society. NZ's government serves the collective safety/security of the people of NZ; That's their role. If they feel the existence of facebook's live streaming threatens NZ's security, then bringing action against it is the reasonable response.)

Do you honestly believe that if FB (and no other platform except self-hosting) offered no live videos (in NZ or worldwide), the shooting would not have happened?

I do know better. It should be an inalienable right. We probably will pass these hate speech laws. We will suffer for it. The founding fathers of the USA got this one right. Trying to engineer society is not a good idea.

It’s not the governments job to descide what speech is okay and what speech is not.

What if that speech is child pornography, or assault and threats, or intellectual property?

Child pornography, is not speech. Should be banned.

Assault, is not speech. Should be banned.

Threats, you are correct threats and incitement to violence should be banned. This is the special case to freedom of speech it results in direct harm or coercion. Harm and coercion should be prevented.

Intellectual property is interesting. Yes the government should be able to enforce contracts. But this raises a good point.

You are correct however the blanked statement "It’s not the governments job to decide what speech is okay and what speech is not." is too simplistic and is incorrect.

There is a better overview that I could provide here: https://www.kialo.com/should-hate-speech-be-legally-protecte...

Why isn't it? We already allow the government to decide many other things, such as what we are allowed to sell (i.e through food safety regulation). Is there any reason why speech is different from other actions that it should have special treatment and be untouchable?

I'm pretty libertarian on many of my views. I think the government should have as little influence in peoples lives as possible. That's the only way, that I can see, you can have a society that allows for a truly diverse range of cultures and beliefs living as they desire under one government.

Where the government does need to step in is on interaction between people. Such as enforcing contracts and keeping actors in the markets honest. This doesn't infringe on personal liberty nearly as much as restrictions on speech.

But there are plenty of regulations I disagree with and think people should be left to make their own decisions freely.

Also I'm not sure you understood my concession above. You're question doesn't seem to follow?

And Facebook is not targeted because who they are, but because Facebook+WhatsApp+Instagram covers a ridiculous large part of the online communication spectrum today.

It's a channel where more and more diseased trash is shared unhindered, and if the owner doesn't do enough to stop it, then the government has to force them by any means necessary.

These are hard questions, and need good answers, not some laws referring vaguely to "abhorrent" content, and some politicians grand standing without really saying anything.

Just to name a few things that I think are utterly abhorrent, but also think should not be censored, because I think the merits of the society being able to see and talk about those things outweigh the downsides:

- The 9/11 footage and the Falling Man in particular: abhorrent

- The dead Syrian refugee kid on the Turkish beach: abhorrent

- Footage from concentration camps and the Holocaust: abhorrent

- The Christchurch shooter and his murder spree: abhorrent

- The footage from the Paris attacks: abhorrent.

- The footage from the Boston Marathon bombing: abhorrent.

- The screaming naked girl, running away from her village in Vietnam: abhorrent

Or are you saying those agencies don't do enough to hold accountable the companies that caused all those problems? Because that doesn't seem like an argument against regulating tech companies. That seems like an argument for regulating tech companies, and those other companies, more strictly.